It has recently been proposed to prepare a fish meat powder retaining the KAMABOKO-forming property of fresh fish meat by grinding fresh fish meat in the presence of an oligosaccharide such as sucrose, a polyhydric alcohol such as sorbitol and an aliphatic acid ester and subsequently spray-drying the resultant fish meat slurry.
With this method, however, a problem is encountered in that the fish meat slurry has too high a viscosity for the spray-drying step to be carried out without difficulty.
One modification of the above process involves first finely mincing fresh fish meat or frozen ground fish meat in the presence of divalent metal ions to produce a fish meat slurry, then adjusting the pH value of the fish meat slurry to the neighborhood of neutrality and thereafter, spray-drying the slurry, whereby the viscosity of the fish meat slurry is sufficiently lowered (to about 30 poises) to facilitate the spray-drying and permit the fish meat slurry to be spray-dried without denaturation of the muscular proteins of the fish meat in the slurry (Japanese Patent Application No. SHO 48-48467).
When KAMABOKO or other similar paste products are manufactured from the fish meat powder obtained by the modified method, however, the divalent metal ions, which remain in the powder, must be sequestered and this sequestration requires incorporation of sodium pyrophosphate or other similar sequestrant into the powder, thus limiting the utility and processing of the finally produced fish meat powder.